“Dirty Period”: Freedom of Speech in the Russian Province in 1905–1913 through the Eyes of the Local Administration

Abstract

Using memoirs, journalism, business correspondence, and heads of provincial administration late Imperial Russia, this article examines attitudes to freedom of speech imposed by the Manifesto of 17 October 1905. The democratic freedoms granted from the crown at one of the most tense moments of the first Russian revolution were immediately and actively used by the liberation movement to fight the existing system, which predetermined the further negative attitude towards them from the tsarist bureaucracy. The owners of the provinces were not used to open criticism of their actions by various social forces, and the identification of government repression with their names in the opposition press was perceived as a threat to their own lives. The heads of the provincial state apparatus expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that freedom of speech had ruined their monopoly on the interpretation of state policy and evaluation of social processes. Administrative repression and prosecution prevented the bureaucracy from fully taking control of the independent press, which was the main expression of freedom of speech in this historical period, and in the eyes of local administration leaders, the main troublemaker in provincial society. In relation to freedom of speech, representatives of the provincial administrative elite regret the inability to squeeze this phenomenon of public life into the usual bureaucratic framework. Their administrative mentality, formed by a long career in the autocratic bureaucracy, did not allow them to adequately perceive democratic changes in public life.